
Americans like being the best at things. We’re the best at baseball, jazz, freedom, national parks—pretty much anything Ken Burns has already covered. Yes, living in the Land of Opportunity is glorious. Now, I’d like to award us (and, by us, I mean U.S.) a super-sized gold medal for smashing words together more efficiently than anyone else in the world.
Because Americans value efficiency, we combine multiple words into one super word. One way we do this is through contractions.
Don’t worry—I’m not talking about the kind of contractions that lead to babies. I’m talking about combining two words to make one short word. These words include don’t (do not), we’ve (we...